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Saturday, 12 December 2015

Editing through Kindness - Skirt Yankers who care about exposed bums

I
watched a lovely lady wander through a church buffet once and gasped in horror
at her terrible faux pas. Having visited the toilet, she’d accidentally tucked
her skirt hem into her white knickers and moseyed happily through a large group
munching on her scone. It looked awful. It was one of those heart stopping
moments where I knew I had to do something as her bottom drifted past my face,
but temporary paralysis kept me in my seat as I wondered how to sort it out.

How
do you mend that kind of public problem without even more awkwardness? Horror was
replaced by a thousand questions.

1.
I’d never conversed with the lady, so if I yanked it out, would she slap me?

2.
What could I say as I fondled the bottom of a stranger?

3.
Should I be smiling as I performed the act, or would I look like a pervert?

4.
Should I leave it for someone else to deal with?

5.
What would I want to happen if it were me?

In
a single fluid movement, my friend leapt to life, lurched for the woman, yanked
the skirt down, said, “Hey friend, nice legs,” pinched her bottom and sat back next
to me.

The
lady turned and thanked her with genuine gratitude and my friend continued our
conversation. My mouth refused to close and I degenerated into a horrible
companion, complete with hero worship and accolade. I made more of a fuss in my
seat than she had lurching for a stranger’s bottom. What she did was so natural
and it confounded me.

Many
years later found me in a different country, working part-time in an all-boys
school. Wearing a pretty floral dress, I made my way from the staff toilets to
where I’d parked my car that morning, a kilometre away in a side street. To get
to it, I needed to walk past the windows of the English department containing
over 200 boys aged between fourteen and nineteen. They studied Shakespeare
while I escaped for the day. I felt a yank on the bottom of my dress and turned
in surprise. “You had your skirt tucked in your...”

The
skirt yanker went crimson with embarrassment and flapped her hand wildly at my
bare legs. She didn’t know what to say but performed that small kindness for me
anyway, a sisterhood in our testosterone laden environment. I thanked her and went on my way, passing the classroom windows without
incident. It could have been a very different scene complete with school
newspaper headline.

There’s
no easy way to point out a screw up but if you care about someone’s dignity,
you kinda have to. Yes I write, but I’m also an avid reader. When I see a novel
with the same typo repeated to the point of annoyance, or a bad habit in a
writer’s otherwise amazing work, I am honour bound as a fellow author to yank
that skirt right out of their knickers, even if I don’t have the words to do it
without embarrassment.

I’ve
said many times how OCD I am about pretty much everything. In the same way I
can’t pass something out of place, I also can’t read and ignore blatant
oopsies. My secret vice is that I note every error on my Kindle, which shows up
as a file marked ‘Clippings’ when I sync with my computer.

The
problem is knowing what to do with these ‘edits’ once I have them. Those same
questions plague me again.

1.
I’d never conversed with them socially, so if I point it out, will they hate
me?

2.
What can I say as I broach their mistakes?

3.
Should I smile sweetly as I defame their product and then never talk to them
again?

4.
Should I leave it for someone else to deal with?

5.
What would I want to happen if it were me?

I
will try to communicate with the author because it seems wrong to collect 50+
edits and then delete them when I would love to be sent a file of things wrong
and enjoy the opportunity to fix them.

As
an author, I’ve permanently got my skirt tucked in my knickers no matter how
many times my work is edited. There’s a typo breeding programme which few
readers know of and nothing short of annual editing will cull the blighters as
they increase inside a perfectly produced manuscript with no encouragement.

As
a child I found errors in publications of Enid Blyton. There’s a rather amusing
incident in which Noddy goes to bed with his hat on instead of taking it off.
That’s just not ok and I noticed it aged 6 concluding that even poor Enid needed
a skirt yanker too. I took on the role of self-appointed yanker and composed a
letter to Enid which my mother loyally posted from our home on an Air Force
base in Gütersloh, West Germany. Many years later Wikipedia reliably informed
me that Enid didn’t receive my letter, having died the year before my birth. There
were several more skirt yanking moments between myself and Enid and I often
wonder what Mother did with my letters. Knowing her, she spent our meagre
income on an expensive overseas stamp and posted my offering to Enid’s London publisher
without ever receiving a response.

So
what to do, what to do? I stop my busyness and find I have twelve A4 pages of
edits burning a hole in my ‘helping others’ folder from my latest read.

I’ve
had mixed responses through offering my pages of corrections in a Word document,
which I spent hours making fit for understanding. One author who I knew by
association, accused me of touting for paid editing. She was wrong. There was
nothing I could add to the edits I offered for free. She didn’t want them and I
deleted them from my file. It was very hard to review her novel after that,
knowing she didn’t have a teachable spirit and her work would never improve. Nobody
would ever be able to help her, not just me. I read none of her other works and
subsequently doubted the 5*reviews she got. She didn’t just have her skirt
tucked in her knickers, peculiar grammar and juvenile use of speech meant she had
no knickers on at all under there!

The
irony is she didn’t need to get personal; she could have accepted the edits,
said thank you and walked away. I’ve no intention of checking afterwards that
my suggestions were implemented. I’ve moved on. I’m jotting down things from
the next book I’m reading.

But
there have also been lovely responses. A complete stranger who I stalked on Goodreads
to find an email address, thanked me profusely. She’d had numerous paid editors
check her work and was surprised. Her novel was clean of typos but one
important omission blew her mystery-thriller up in her face. When a reader
knows something isn’t possible; the author’s in trouble. She thanked me and I
believe she changed her conclusion. I haven’t checked but I wish her well.

My trusty Kindle

I’ve
had sweet emails from traditionally published and indie authors but sadly
deleted as many sets of notes as I’ve sent. It makes me wonder about all these
folk who seem happy to walk around with their skirts tucked in their knickers.

Let’s
just get this straight. I am not happy with anything less than perfect. I want
a skirt-yanker and if that’s you, then so be it. I shall brace myself for
impact.

Yes
it can hurt. One of my favourite people in the world is a writer who private messaged
me on Facebook and said she’d downloaded my book but daren’t review it because
of all the things wrong. She took the trouble to point them out and I spent the
next 6 months in edits and rewrites. The words ‘had’ and ‘that’ need an
immigration visa nowadays to enter my novels and I know how many have licence
to exist, should they try to breed while my back is turned. I bought paid editing
help and banned curse words such as ‘just’ from coming anywhere near my
keyboard during formal writing. Adverbs are used sparingly, like sprinkles on
special occasions. A trusted author reads my beta work before publication and
once sent 46 A4 pages in teeny font of things wrong. Gratitude means I return
the favour with dedication and pernickety-ness which isn’t a word I know.

I printed all 46 pages off and yes they were double sided. I stapled them by section and
implemented them over one very painful weekend. I remain grateful to Demelza Carlton
who cared enough about me and my work to collect and send them. After a few years of
collaboration, we're down to about 2 pages each pre-release.

Why do I care?
Because I do not want my knickers or worse, my bum, on show for the world to
laugh at.

So
I will continue to make scatty notes on my Kindle as I pound away on my
treadmill in the morning. They won’t be essays because I’m short sighted and
won’t stop the machine, so if an author finds a convoluted description of the
error, they can be sure I fell off.

My
qualifications are an honours degree in English and almost two decades in
education, plus a decade of writing and making common mistakes. I listen to
other authors and do online tutorials related to writing and producing clean
work. I am committed to not making the same mistakes twice, which helps with
new works.

A
short dance with the role of professional editor sent me off the deep end with
OCD because I needed to catch everything
and I mean everything. What many
authors don’t do is read the small print in their editing contract. There may
be a clause in it which lists how many edits per chapter can be caught as a minimum.
I subcontracted for someone who after I pulled an all-nighter and contacted him
in tears because the work (already published) needed a complete rewrite, told
me this astounding fact. “Just flag ten errors per chapter.”

“But,”
I sobbed over Google Hangout, “I can do that in the first paragraph.”

“Yeah,
don’t do that,” he said. “Spread it out a bit. And by the way, you’re flagging
grammar and typos, not doing rewrites. It’s a 6 hour job. I can’t pay you for
the other 28 you’ve done but thanks for all the updates. Maybe for you, I don’t
need them hourly, despite what it said in your contract.”

The
expression is, ‘horses for courses.’ Different editors catch different error
types. You may have employed two professional editors, but they weren’t paid to
overhaul your entire manuscript. And each person is different. One has a pet
hate of word misuse while another goes after passive voice like a heat seeking
missile. Horses for courses. Never forget that.

I
go after many things and can’t stop. I won’t walk past those belly-pants on
show for the world and I can’t do it professionally because I’m too obsessive
and it makes me ill. If I do it as a reader, I convince myself it’s part of my
reading process; not my job. Phew. That makes it all right then.

One
question remains unanswered. When someone offers you free edits why would you
not take them? I can’t offer any clues. When a lovely reader recently pointed
out an error in my latest novel I thanked her gratefully and went after that
little sucker in my manuscript like a zombie hunter, hoping to find the nest
while I was in there.

The
satisfaction of knowing my knickers are temporarily not on show is overwhelming. Send them. Send those errors in their
ones and twos, warn me gently if they’re in their tens but send them.

Yank
that skirt out of my knickers. Don’t leave me showing my bum when you know I’ll
be embarrassed. Please I beg you and promise I won’t shout.

COME FIND ME

Living and writing in New Zealand is a privilege

Writing is a way of purging the strange imaginary people from my head; they only shut up if I pretend to write down what they say. I am an English woman living in New Zealand, treading water and always out of my depth. Married with grown up children, I've been in love with the hottest soccer referee in New Zealand for almost quarter of a century.

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